The Portuguese came to this coast first: on 22 April 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet landed just to the north, at what is now Porto Seguro, and claimed the continent for the Portuguese crown. In 1583, Jesuit priests founded a mission for the indigenous Tupiniquim of the region, naming it São João Baptista dos Índios — Saint John the Baptist of the Indians. The simple whitewashed church they built, São João Batista, still stands at the eastern end of the Quadrado, its door opening toward the sea where missionaries and native peoples first crossed paths. The Jesuits were expelled from Portuguese territories in 1759, but the settlement held on, surviving first as a Tupiniquim community, then as a fishing village of mixed descent, and then as nothing at all — a quiet place too far from anywhere to matter.

For most of the twentieth century, reaching Trancoso meant a boat or a donkey or a long, hot walk through the mata atlântica. That was part of what kept it whole. In the 1970s a small trickle of counter-culture travellers from Rio and São Paulo began finding the place and staying; they restored the candy-coloured houses around the Quadrado and learned, slowly, how to live near the sea. In 1999 a highway opened from Trancoso to Porto Seguro, which has a commercial airport, and the trickle became a flood. Club Méditerranée arrived, and then the fashion photographers, and then the Italian billionaires. What is remarkable is how much of the old village survived the arrival. The Quadrado is now protected by UNESCO as part of the Costa do Descobrimento heritage complex. The colours remain. The little church still looks out at the Atlantic.

South of the Quadrado the cliffs fall away to a long chain of half-wild beaches, each with its own reputation. Praia dos Nativos has beach-bars and music. Praia dos Coqueiros — Coconut Palm Beach — is a small crescent hedged by more than a hundred palms and protected at low tide by coral reefs that form natural warm swimming pools. Further south, Praia da Pedra Grande is narrower, quieter, better for surfing and for solitude. Half an hour's drive on a red-dirt road leads to Praia do Espelho, the Mirror Beach, named for the way its reef-bound tidepools reflect the sky. The road is often passable only in dry weather. That is part of the point. Trancoso's beaches are not resorts; they are places where the coconut palms lean and the sand is soft and the Atlantic, here, is warm almost year-round.

Every 20 January the Quadrado fills for the festival of São Sebastião — Saint Sebastian, a patron whose feast day the locals celebrate with drums, guitars, and a short sung verse that begins São Sebastião, hoje chegou o dia. Vimos festejar com toda a alegria — Saint Sebastian, your day has arrived; we have come to joyfully celebrate it. The festival is old, rooted in the same Catholic-Portuguese-Afro-Brazilian layering that runs through all of Bahia, and for one night the Quadrado belongs entirely to the people who live here, not to the visitors who have bought up the colour-block houses around it. It is a reminder that the village is still a village, that the square is still the square, that the church door still opens toward the sea.

Around Trancoso, the APA Caraíva-Trancoso — a state Environmental Protection Area — works to slow the speed of new building along the coast and inland; the federal Ministry of the Environment is expanding nearby parks to protect the last patches of Atlantic rainforest that once covered this entire shore. The balance is never simple. The real estate has boomed; the snowbirds from Canada, Italy, and Israel have settled; some of the old families have been priced out. But the Quadrado itself is almost exactly what it was forty years ago, and the local association that maintains it intends to keep it that way. Some places resist more than they accept. Trancoso is one of them.